Menu

Episode 14: Hail to the Marketing Chief

If you’ve ever worked in Marketing or IT (or found yourself somehow pinned between the two), you’ve learned that they don’t play well together. Why?

Well, let’s think about this… briefly. Marketing goes to its clients and says, “We’re going to make this amazing software that comes up with new tricks even before you can think of them. PLUS, we’re going to roll it out in ONLY 26 hours! Just watch us.” They then get back to the office and shoot an email over to IT: hurry and do this. What are we doing in IT? Just sitting around and waiting for these really important requests. What else would we be doing?

And how might the IT personnel handle the slight animosity between their department and Marketing? By planning sacrificial ceremonies, of course. How else would we handle it?

Picture this: I was working on a project where Contracted Developer Man was juggling the requirements that The Chief had told our clients he would develop in some brand new online software. Due to Contracted Developer Man’s impressive skills, the new application would be a winner. However, The Chief wanted to help, too. Note to Marketing: the best help you can offer is to let the developers and testers do their jobs.

Before long, Contracted Developer Man and I were plotting ways to sacrifice The Chief. It’s not that we didn’t like him AS A PERSON; it’s just that there were a few things that he did that got to be a wee bit irritating:

Hovered around Contracted Developer Man’s shared cubicle trying to tell him how to do his job,

Offered his own services to assist with software testing (because apparently, I couldn’t do my own job),

Wanted access to the program where I write test cases,

Had his boss call the CIO on a Friday after 4:30 pm with an issue that just HAD TO BE FIXED RIGHT NOW, even though Contracted Developer Man had left and I had already told them we would resolve it first thing Monday morning,

Started reporting errors in the application (while it was still in the dev environment) straight to Contracted Developer Man,

Sent an email that said, “LOL.”

Obviously the LOL email was the last straw and I am so sad to report that The Chief is no longer with us.

(P.S. Yes, Contracted Developer Man took my rocking survey and therefore received the nod in this blog; The Chief did NOT take the survey, nor did he know about this blog.)

Post navigation

2 comments

I used to think that somehow Novell was somewhat of a less efficient company than others until I starting reading your IT Office posts and realized that all IT offices are just about the same, or at least yours sounds very similar to the one I worked in – scary.